This Startup Has A Plan To Control Everything In Your Home Over The Internet

SmartThings, the company that lets you control household objects
like lights and door locks over the internet, is making a bigger
push to bring hardware companies and developers to its platform.

Today, the company announced several product manufacturers have
formally joined the SmartThings ecosystem. There's also a new
iPhone app launching later tonight that'll make it easier to
control all the connected stuff in your home.

It's best to think of
SmartThings as a platform to connect all the stuff in your home
rather than a one-off product. To get started, you need to buy
the SmartThings hub, a small gadget that looks kind of like a
router and talks to web-connected devices designed to work with
SmartThings. You then control everything using the SmartThings
app or website. Starter kits begin at
$199.

There are already a bunch of
SmartThings-compatible devices, and the company announced today
formal partnerships with some app and hardware makers like the
fitness tracker UP24 from Jawbone, lighting control company
Leviton, and Life360, an app that helps you track family
members.

The company also announced a
formal app review process so developers can create new actions
for SmartThings devices and publish them through the SmartThings
app. It'll sort of be like the App Store on your iPhone, but for
real objects in your home.

The SmartThings system is a lot
different than Nest, which
Google bought for $3.2 billionand is perhaps the buzziest company in the
connected home space. Nest makes its own connected devices like
thermostats and smoke detectors, and it only allows third parties
limited access to its platform.

SmartThings' strategy is to
allow any company that wants to build smart devices onto the
platform and share the revenue. Today's announcement gives us a
glimpse at how it plans to convince more manufacturers and app
developers to get on board.

The SmartThings
hub.SmartThings

SmartThings hasn't said how
many users it has, but it did tout a bunch of stats about its
current customers along with today's announcement. The company
says SmartThings users open the app an average of four times per
day and now have an average of 10 connected devices in their
homes, up from five a year ago.